


Choices

by Caevon



Category: Divergent - All Media Types, Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28697343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caevon/pseuds/Caevon
Summary: The world stops for you when something horrible happens, but the rest moves on. Tobias, after a terrible car accident that leaves him in a coma, makes a choice. [Canon-compliant] [ONE-SHOT]
Relationships: Four | Tobias Eaton/Christina, Four | Tobias Eaton/Tris Prior
Kudos: 6





	Choices

**Tobias**

**Ten Years After Tris' Choosing Day**

_Though love repine, and reason chafe,_

_There came a voice without reply,—_

_"'T is man's perdition to be safe,_

_When for the truth he ought to die."_

-RALPH WALDO EMERSON

* * *

It's exactly ten years after her Choosing Day. Christina knows it too, and we're both abnormally quiet that morning when we get up for work. It's a little more somber than usual, but we've both gotten over it mostly— I no longer get nightmares of _her_ dying, and everything for the most part is well.

It's a day like any other. We make breakfast, shower and eat quickly, and head out into the city. I kiss Christina on the cheek before she goes off towards her training sessions, and begin my hour-long drive to the Hub.

We don't use the trains anymore, but I miss them. After a few people died jumping on and off them I think they decided it wasn't exactly the best idea, but I miss it all the same. The commute to work is long and boring as usual, with a healthy amount of traffic.

Work is normal today. We go over some files ("Why the _hell_ are those Erudite kids trying to steal from the farms _again_?" Zeke yells. It's our fifth report that month for food theft). Everything is pleasant and goes as usual.

Zeke asks me how Christina is and if a baby's coming yet, and I blush and tell him that yes, we're trying, but we've only been for a week so far. He grins at me. "Do I get to name your kids then, Four?"

"Hell no."

 _Four._ Do I still have four fears? Marcus is gone replaced by the memory of Tris, but I don't think that remains any longer. I've moved on. But Cara has the last of the simulation serum, and I can't be sure. Maybe I'm Three now.

I stay at work later than usual after a quick message to Christina explaining that I'm with Zeke. "Don't get drunk," she responds humorously. I'm sure she remembers that time Zeke and I got so drunk that we were about to get married to each other right then and there. But the two of us just sit and talk about things and life and _peace_. No alcohol tonight.

It's dark out when I leave the building, a winter night so the sun sets early. I've been out this late before and I don't really mind. Dauntless never feared the dark.

But tonight is different from the other nights.

I don't see it coming until it's too late. It's on the wrong side of the road, swerving madly. The driver's probably drunk.

The eighteen-wheeler is so close— so, so close, coming, and I can't do anything to stop it and I know I won't get out of the way in time. The car doors seem to tighten in around me and shrink as the truck barrels toward me—

Everything is black.

* * *

When I come to, I'm somewhere I know too well. The rooftop of the entrance to Dauntless, the one all initiates jump off into the waiting net below— if they survive their first jump off the train, that is. I'm pretty sure I was last jumper in my year. I'm standing right by the edge, and I'm certain that if the wind blows the wrong way I'll fall. My heart beats faster.

_Fear of heights._

_But this isn't real either,_ I remind myself. I'm probably dead anyways. I don't know.

A warm, familiar touch pulls me away from the rim faster than I can get away by myself, and I find my eyes staring into a familiar brown.

"Tris," I say in disbelief. She just smiles. She looks a little bit older, maybe twenty or so, and there is some kind of wisdom that glints in her eyes. She looks more peaceful, happier than I remember seeing her before she—

"Tobias." My name is a whisper on her lips. She's still smiling. "You shouldn't be here tonight. You've got a whole life ahead of you."

I forget how to think, and for a moment I just look at her blankly. Then my senses come back to me. "Am— am I dead?"

Her eyes search mine. "Sort of, but not quite."

"What do you—"

Tris places a hand on my cheek and it shuts me up instantly; I notice now that we're merely inches away from each other now. It's warm against my skin and achingly familiar, and I lean in. The kiss is chaste and sweet, yet filled with longing fervor and passion. We stay in place there for what seems like a thousand years.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "For leaving you. I wish I didn't have to go."

"I wish you didn't have to either," I whisper back. There's a thousand things I want to say and not enough words to say them. "I love you."

"I love you too."

"I had to," Tris says after a long period of silence. "It wasn't right— it wasn't right to Caleb to die when he didn't know what it truly meant. Dying for the right cause for the wrong reason. It wasn't fair. And it wasn't fair for you either. I'm sorry."

Breathing in her scent, I say nothing, but deep down I know there's a truth to her words. She shouldn't have left me. But she loved Caleb despite all he'd done, and she couldn't let him go without him understanding. I didn't understand why she couldn't have just let him do it, but I was willing to try.

Tries breaks away first, and there's a single tear trailing down her cheek. But she's still smiling.

"How's life?" She asks as if inquiring about the weather yet her gaze is burning a hole into me. We're still mere centimeters apart.

I gape at her in open-mouthed shock. "You're dead, I'm dead, and you ask me 'how's life?'"

"I didn't say you were dead." Tris shrugs. "You're what we call in-between, somewhere between life and death. You're probably in a coma of some sort right now and they'll shut off life support eventually. And here you get to make a choice."

"What do you mean, make a choice?"

Her gaze is intense. "You jump, jump off this building and into the pit, and you'll go home to the living. Or we'll wait here together when the next train comes and we'll ride it until the end of the line, wherever it takes us." Riding the train until the end of the line, like that day so long ago we escaped Jeanine's murder-puppets, off into the peace of whatever afterlife this was… it didn't seem so bad to me.

"I— Christina—" I blurt out, my face turning red. "We're—"

"Married, yes," she finishes, her lips twitching in amusement. "I've seen."

"You're not angry?"

Tris laughs. It's light and carefree. "Why would I be angry seeing the two of you happy?"

"I thought—"

"Look, Tobias," she says softly. I can barely hear her. "I was sixteen when I died. You were eighteen then. There's a whole life ahead of you and I love you and I want to see you happy. You've got decades left and I'd be pretty damn selfish if I told you to come with me. I just want you to be happy. With my best friend. You're happy now, and you've finally come to peace with your grief. That's all I want to see."

A bitter smile makes its way across my face. "Yeah, sixteen and eighteen, running off to save the world because the _adults_ wouldn't do their jobs without being selfish, ignorant, lying, violent _cowards_."

"Not wrong." She chuckles. It dawns on me that all the insults I used in my last sentence all were flaws of the five Factions. It never really does leave, does it?

"I accepted that it wasn't my fault, you know," Tris muses. "It started with people like David and Jeanine who cared more about winning a pointless game of chess with no prize than the lives of the pieces on the chessboard. The people who died fighting them knew what they were going against and why they did it."

She stares at me intensely again. "I guess that's why I had to go too," she says.

"Maybe," I whisper, "it should have been Caleb."

"It should've been David, it should've been Jeanine, it should've been Peter, it should've been Eric instead." Tris is looking over the horizon, somewhere over the fence. Then I realize that this world where we are is a Chicago from over a decade ago, peace on the streets lit by the dawning sun, with the fence there to protect us from the dangers that waited outside. Our city, the last city we knew of in the world.

"But they're people too, Tobias," she continues. "People aren't just bad when they're born, you know. Something makes them that way. I didn't know their stories when I died, but I knew Caleb's, and it would have been so wrong to let him go in. You moved on when you scattered my ashes over the city and you can't go back now. The world keeps going, and you have to too. I died at sixteen, Tobias. Go live your life— I'm just one person."

 _One person, but you were always worth it to me._ The irony of the situation doesn't escape me. In this world I had once been teacher and her the student, uncertain and wavering and scared of the Faction she'd chosen. But here she is, telling me things and being more selfless than any Abnegation could have ever dreamed of. Now she is the instructor, and I am the initiate.

"I guess," I respond reluctantly.

"What's your choice going to be then?" Tris looks at a watch on her wrist. "We're running out of time. The train is coming, and after it passes, the pit will close and no more trains will come."

I understand her implications. Eternal suffering, here on the rooftop, over the pit— I had forgotten just how high we were. But I think about it again and decide that I do not want to spend the rest of time up here, even if it is with Tris. I think of Tris and Natalie and Andrew Prior, of Will and Uriah, their smiles forever imprinted into my memory. Then I remember Zeke and Shauna and Christina and Zeke's son and I make my decision.

"I'll go home." _To Christina, to Zeke and Shauna and everyone._ I don't know how she'll respond.

Tris' eyes, to my surprise, light up. She grins. "I hope I won't be seeing you back here for another seven decades," she says cheerfully. "Not until your age is in the triple digits and you're old and grey and living your happily ever after with great-grandchildren."

I pull her close to me suddenly, and we kiss again, the heat between our bodies flooding through my chest and spreads. I grab her waist and we stay there for a long time, until we hear the rumbling of the train, distant yet steady.

"I love you."

"I love you," I echo. My hand slips a lock of hair back over her ear out of age-old habit. I have so many more words to say, memories to talk about, but there's not enough time—

"Jump, Tobias," Tris whispers, pulling away, "go home. I'll be here when you come back. Promise. We'll have all the time in the world to talk." The curves of her body, her outline, are beginning to fade. She slowly begins to walk away as she starts turning to nothing.

"Wait," I say. Her fading figure turns.

"Is this— is it real? Or is it just happening in my head?" I need answers. I don't have any and I don't know what's happening, but I want to. I _need_ to.

She seems to think hard for a minute, her eyes searching for something that I can't see. A corner of her mouth tilts upwards ever so slightly, and when she speaks it feels like she's talking about something I don't know.

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Tobias, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

Then Tris is gone.

I stand, some sort of strange kind of peace washing over me, and I look down into the gaping hole beneath the roof where ten years yet a lifetime ago a Stiff was the first jumper. A small girl clad in Abnegation grey. I remember the zip-line, the stories about how excited she was her first time, how I screamed the entire way scattering her ashes. For the first time, I'm not afraid of the height.

 _Does that make me Two?_ The laughter bubbles up inside me. Maybe I'll take one last dose of the simulation serum if I can get it from Cara, just to find out, but this time I'll go in lighthearted and _free._

I jump.

* * *

I could've sworn she was there when I woke up, and years later Christina would say so too— "I smelled that perfume I gave her!" she said determinedly. "I know she was there." She was a shadow fluttering about at the edge of the hospital room, and she just smiled when I opened my eyes again. But aside from me or Christina, no one else saw her figure or smelled the perfume.

I hadn't been able to walk or even talk or eat for a long while. Rehabilitation. At first all I could do was blink. But life went on and time passed and we found Christina with child. Apparently they were twins. I was still wheelchair-bound but somewhat confident in my fatherhood skills ("You _won't_ be like Marcus," Christina swears. "I know you won't." I believe her).

When I first held little Brianna and Charles for the first time _she_ was there too. The unmistakable scent of that perfume bottle Christina had gifted to her all those years ago was present, and we discovered it on many major life events. She was there when the grandchildren were born, when the great-grandchildren were born too. But those times were few and years separated each visit.

Sometimes I didn't think of her for weeks or months, which I felt guilty about. Would she have been angry at me for forgetting her? But deep down, I thought she would have wanted me to move on.

And so I did.

This time when I appear on the rooftop again, seventy-two years after the car accident, there's bright yellow CAUTION tape and orange cones in front of me.

"Don't jump this time," she warns. She doesn't look a day over twenty. I look at my hands and decide I probably don't either. "There's a net. You'll just bounce right back up."

I laugh. "Don't worry," I say. "We're riding till the end of the line this time."

I'm not sure what we'll do. Tris is the person I loved first, and it will always be different, but Christina and I will always share the bond that only comes through decades of being together.

I don't know.

But we have an eternity to figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> First attempt at Divergent fanfiction. Constructive criticism is appreciated, toxicity is not.


End file.
